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A series of interpretative difficulties concerning the politics of representation seems insurmountable in Kim Ki-young films, even after multiple viewings. In its audacity and shameless presumptuousness, his cinema portrays notions of masculinity and femininity in perplexing ways, associating male and female characters with non-human or animalistic traits, such as insects and rats, while also degrading them, making them unsympathetic, and reducing their function in the story to their sexuality or obsessiveness. Men and women repeatedly exploit and are exploited by each other, often violently, and one begins to wonder if Kim's depiction of character and plot are intentionally exaggerated. Such representations are typically problematic for the contemporary viewer. They pose questions about how the films are to be read and the extent to which they reflect the ideologies circulating around gender in Korean society or perhaps views that the filmmaker himself may have held. Men and women in Kim's cinema routinely assert seemingly self-evident truths about the nature of the masculine and feminine condition, truths that are nevertheless chauvinistic and often contradictory. “When a woman has a baby, she thinks she's going to die,” Jeong-suk says as she looks at her own newborn child in Woman of Fire (Hwanyeo, 1971). “Most of the patients here,” a man in a mental hospital comments in Insect Woman, “are poor men who became impotent because of their wives’ nagging.” Men and women are engaged in a perpetual battle of the sexes in Kim's films. “A man who can't have one affair in life has nothing to brag about,” boasts the patriarch Dong-sik in Woman of Fire ‘82 (Hwanyeo 82, 1982). “A woman in her twenties is like an angel, thirties a cat, forties a wolf, and fifties a wicked witch,” the madam of a bar remarks in Carnivorous Animals (Yuksik dongmul, 1984). Hearing this, the husband protagonist quickly concludes, “My wife is a wicked witch then. Right, women in their fifties are all wicked witches.” Taken out of context, these and other lines from Kim's films defy the principle in good screenwriting to show and not tell, as his characters bluntly declare their internal emotions and states of mind, as if to refuse the opportunity for the film viewer to interpret and deduce.